Renew Your Domains in Advance to Save Money

Most people renew domain names annually, signing up for another year right before it’s about to expire.

And that seems like a good strategy to keep money in our pocket as long as we can.

However, there are good reasons to take a long-term approach with domain names. Domains can typically be registered for up to ten years in advance. Let’s look at how renewing them for a longer period than a year might save you money and prevent a big headache down the road.

Save Money

As a domain name registrar, Namecheap is a retailer. When you register a domain, Namecheap has to pay a wholesaler known as a registry for each top level domain or TLD (check out this article for more details on how this works).

Registries set a price on each TLD they offer, and the prices may change over time. They usually adjust prices upward, forcing domain registrars to increase their own prices for their customers.

But if you register for another six years right now, you only pay the current price per year, not the higher price you’ll be paying in later years. That’s can result in huge savings, especially if you have multiple domains.

And while 10%-per-year increases are steep, some domains can increase in price even more dramatically. Country-code domain names (those with two characters like .CA and .DE) have very few restrictions on future prices. Furthermore, new top level domain names that registries introduced over the past few years may have no price increase limits. With these domains, there’s no way to predict what they may cost in the future.

Yet all of these domains can be renewed up to ten years in advance—at today’s prices.

Don’t Lose Your Domain

The other big reason to renew your domains many years in advance is to avoid an accidental lapse in your registration.

Every day thousands of domain registrations are deleted because people forgot to renew them or the credit card they had on file with their registrar was no longer active. These domains are usually snapped up by people who will charge a lot of money if you want to buy the domain back from them.

Take a Look at Your Domains

You might not want to renew a domain name for ten years if you’re not sure you’ll be using it for long. But most people who have active websites plan to keep running them for a long time. I personally renew domains for my family names and my websites for 8-10 years in advance. Take a look at your domains and figure out which ones you’ll definitely continue renewing.